Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @06:48AM
from the space-horses-run-the-cia dept.

sciencehabit writes with an excerpt from Science: "About 25,000 years ago, humans began painting a curious creature on the walls of European caves. Among the rhinos, wild cattle, and other animals, they sketched a white horse with black spots. Although such horses are popular breeds today, scientists didn't think they existed before humans domesticated the species about 5000 years ago. Now, a new study of prehistoric horse DNA concludes that spotted horses did indeed roam ancient Europe, suggesting that early artists may have been reproducing what they saw rather than creating imaginary creatures."

There are actually two reasons why archeologists believed that the spotted horses were imaginary. The first is that in dogs a spotted coat is a result of the domestication process (as was demonstrated by a Russian researcher who bred foxes to produce a creature that had the same relationship to foxes that dogs have to wolves--simplification of the study). The second is that earlier studies of the DNA of horses from the time showed only black and brown coats.